December 15, 2024
LED panels
You can get these in various dimensions.
32x32, 64x32, 64x64.
They are used to build really big displays on the sides of vehicles
and on buildings.
The interface is "HUB75" which is not officially standardized, but seems to be something the people
who make these have generally agreed upon. The voltage levels can be either 3.3 or 5.0 volts, so watch out.
The clock is limited to about 25 Mhz, meaning you can maybe refresh a 64x64 panel at 200 Hz (maybe 240).
The following reports 45-50 Mhz working with a 16x32 panel.
Biker Glen
Here is a very nice writeup. He used a BBB along with the now obsolete "Logicbone" FPGA board.
He ran his panel with a 200 Hz update.
He did this work back in 2013 or so. The beagle project you want is "led-panel-v01".
All the FPGA work is in Verilog He apparently used the "ISE" software from Xilinx.
The Logibone had a Spartan-6 LX9 FPGA.
Tang Nano resources
As near as I can tell "Lushay Labs" is a site set up to promote the Tang Nano FPGA products.
These are FPGA made in China with development software available.
The demo here uses their 9K unit, but a 20K unit is also available.
You can buy them on Amazon for prices around $35 -- it looks like the little boards
have a USB connector for use programming them.
At any event, his code is Verilog and should be easy to use on other devices.
Adafruit board
This has several RUC7258 chips and a lot of ICN2037 chips (as well as some others).
Have any comments? Questions?
Drop me a line!
Tom's Electronics pages / tom@mmto.org